End of Women: Part Four

Ready And Waiting

[Damian arrives at Mars Station and is met by the man who has been contacting him, who is revealed as the new Chairman, Lee Zong. EXP: Government intended takeover of compound system, Arrowhead looking to muscle in. Damian headhunted]

Damian stepped off the dusty, disused railroad tracks. His eyes were so fixed upon the sight before them that he half-tripped over the rusted rail line and caught himself in the sand. 

Ahead of him was Mars Station, a tan-coloured monolith that to Damian resembled a giant sandcastle, only sturdy, unyielding and resolute. Its fortified walls of sandstone were peppered with arrow-slits of windows, glassless and black. A flagpole buried in the central castellated towerhouse bore the Arrowhead banner. It was a medieval castle in America, utterly bizarre and out of place, and yet it looked as though it had stood there forever, and would exist there forevermore.

Damian gathered himself and set off towards the gap at the base of the monolith. There was no perimeter fence, no checkpoint or sentry. It was totally unprotected. How can they be so careless? he asked himself. The air was full of cloudy dust and the smell of the salt pans nearby wafted beneath his nose. He could be forgiven for thinking the place deserted, it was so quiet, all noise captured and expelled on the eternal winds.

At the base Damian saw two men flanking the entryway. They were soldiers, and they wore the tan uniforms of their compatriots. Slung about their backs were assault rifles, custom made; in fact, everything they had or wore seemed to have been made by hand, with the incomplete edges and unrefined marks of something a man makes himself. They saw him when he was about fifty yards out.

"Stop there!" One of them ordered him, and he stopped. Damian put a hand in the air, and then the other, showing he carried no weapons. He was glad neither of them had been so startled by him that they had taken aim. 

"Good Morning!" He called out, feeling the rasp in his voice at once. "I have come on invitation!"

The two men looked at each other for a moment, and then the second said, "from who?"

Damian suddenly realised he had no answer to that. He had hoped whoever had been calling him would be waiting here for him, but then there was no way that was practical. He lowered his hands.

"Uh... I never was given a name..."

"Come up, slowly."

He closed the distance between himself and the guards and stopped when they shoved a fist in the air. They looked him up and down more closely.

"You know where you are?"

"This is Mars Station." He repeated blankly.

The man to Damian's left pressed a finger into his own ear and started to speak. 

"Got a man here, sending you a profile now." A few seconds passed, and then he responded to inaudible radio crackling. "Roger that Sir. Sending him your way."

The men stepped aside and inclined their heads, the left man waving his hand in the direction of the station interior. Damian thanked them both, nerves jangling, and walked in through the sandstone corridor, apparently into complete darkness.

After about twenty paces the darkness fell away, replaced by flickering torchlight. Voices echoed towards him, voices that belonged to the shadows that danced across his face, and soon they became bodies; more Arrowhead men that were moving up and down a long concourse. The place looked like an ancient Egyptian temple on the inside, rows of thick sandstone columns rising to meet a ceiling of solid rock a hundred feet up. Nestled in the ceiling were clusters of hanging iron cages, and inside them were women. From so far below Damian could not tell if these were alive or dead, but those nearer to him, shackled and branded into the torch-brackets on the walls, breathed harshly as they hung spread-eagled, looks of exquisite agony on their faces, sweat sliding over their bodies to mix with milky-white wax from the candles and blackened with ash from the torches behind their heads. These light-fittings were largely ignored by the tan-covered men marching back and forth through the great concourse, and they ignored Damian as well. They all seemed busy, eager to get somewhere, looks of consternation and concentration apparent in every eye.

Damian jumped as someone put a hand on his shoulder. He turned around to see a man a little older than himself, of East-Asian extraction and tall, lean-bodied with a whispy beard.

"Good to finally meet you." He said, and the voice was instantly familiar. 

"Oh... Hi."

"Glad we can put all of that cloak-and-dagger stuff to bed, as you rightly suggested. My name is Lee, Lee Zong, Director of Operations here at Mars Station." Lee checked around them, as if only just noticing how little privacy they had. "Please, follow me."

Damian did, and they went through another dark and narrow stone corridor into an ante-chamber. The walls in there were decorated with flayed skins of women, but much like the old tiger-skin rugs, the heads had been preserved intact through taxidermy. They hung from the walls like tapestries, staring with glassy eyes at the table at the centre of the room.

"I hope we have not bothered you too much," Lee took a seat and gestured towards the empty one for Damian, who sat, "but we are in need of your help."

"Seems like you have all the help you need here." Damian replied.

"You might think so. Tell me, what do you know about the Arrowheads?"

Damian considered that question. The answer, in truth, was very little.

"Only rumours."

"Fascinating. May I hear them?"

Damian shrugged. "When I was a kid, growing up in our street you always heard about it. Our gardener, Joel, he joined the Arrowheads, first in the neighbourhood to do it. My Pa didn't approve but it was just accepted. Women and girls would vanish near Joel's place and we knew what he was doing. Few other guys joined up, suddenly it was this big thing, and women in the area were moving away... or getting caught. We used to tease the girls at school by telling them the Arrowheads were coming to get them. It was true, but we didn't know it."

Damian left out the part of the story he told very few people. One night he had been staying over at a friend's house, not knowing that the boy's father was an Arrowhead. About seven at night the man had come home dragging a woman over the threshold, kicking and screaming with her hands tied behind her back. He had taken her into the basement as she begged and pleaded for mercy. After the basement door slammed closed, Damian had listened to the sounds of high-pitched screaming mingled with whirring blades, grinding mechanics and slashes and lashes. He remembered exactly what his friend had said to the man as he came back up covered in blood.

Nice job, Dad!

"So why do you guys need my help? Got more women than you can process?"

"As it happens, yes, but there are ways to deal with that." Lee clicked his tongue. "We are preparing for something far more dangerous and infinitely more complex than a simple woman problem."

"And what is that?" Damian asked.

Lee smiled and poured himself, and Damian, a shot of some transparent and powerful-smelling alcoholic substance.

"War." Lee said, chinking their glasses together.